Vagrant Book: Second Edition

Web-based software projects are becoming increasingly complicated, with a range of dependencies, requirements and interlinking components. Swapping between projects which require different versions of the same software, becomes troublesome, and getting team members up and running on new projects becomes time-consuming.

Vagrant gets rid of that problem. By containing each of your projects into a number of Vagrant managed virtual machines, and combining the project with instructions, in code, as to how Vagrant needs to configure a base virtual machine image to run your application. Because the configuration is all in code, it is easily shared amongst colleagues, resulting in team onboarding becoming a simple case of vagrant up.

Last month my latest book, Creating Development Environments with Vagrant (second edition) was published. It aims to serve as an introduction to users who are new to Vagrant and its concepts, to get them using it on their projects quickly and easily.

Since the first edition was published, there have been some exciting changes in the Vagrant ecosystem, so in addition to most of the content being updated, the second edition also features two new chapters:

Using Ansible. There are many provisioning tools supported by Vagrant to take your bare bones VM and turn it, idempotently, into a functioning server for a particular purpose. Ansible has gained much more popularity since the first edition, so merits its own introductory chapter.

HashiCorp Atlas. HashiCorp, the commercial company behind Vagrant have introduced an offering of free and commercial services to compliment Vagrant and make certain tasks easier, specifically: finding and distributing base OS boxes for Vagrant and sharing HTTP(S) or SSH access to your VM with colleagues across the internet.